Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important...

An empirical finding by Gaspar, Jaramillo and Wingender (2016) shows that once countries cross a tax-to-GDP threshold of around 12 3/4 percent, real GDP per capita increases sharply and in a sustained manner over the following decade. In this paper, we attempt via four case studies-Spain, China,...